Hughes doesn't think the bites could be anything else — such as the vein-cutting behaviour exhibited by some other ants or beetles during feeding — because the location on the leaf vein and shape of the marks are so unusual. "It is not normal ant behaviour to bite into the leaf vein because it has no real nutritional value to the ant and can in fact be toxic in some plant species," he says.

And just for completeness, here is a nice summary of other examples of parasites controlling the behavior of their host:

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it... You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans...

You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president...

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests...

More at the link, which cites a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, "Covert Operations." Here are some excerpts from that article:

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him...

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars...

The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement...

In 1958, Fred Koch [their father] became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent...

A flurry of photos and videos in recent weeks have demonstrated the bizarre result that occurs when a camera shutter moves more slowly than the object being photographed (see above video). While the explanation made sense, the shapes generated didn't make sense to me until I viewed the video below.

Faced with mounting debt and looming costs from the new federal health-care law, many local governments are leaving the hospital business, shedding public facilities that can be the caregiver of last resort...

Most sales include stipulations that the companies keep services, he said. "You've got to provide the array of services that the community expects," he said. "Otherwise you're not going to get the consumers using them.''

He and his family are suing the school, claiming that the teacher "did not warn Dubois and other students of the dangers of the electrical demonstration cords..."

The thumbnail at left is a screengrab of a cell phone video, from the Boston Herald, which has additional details re the actions of the teacher, some of which appear to offer justification for a lawsuit.

The image above is a scanning EM of the head of the larva of a sunburst diving beetle. It looks like it has two pairs of eyes, but it actually has six pairs of eyes, some of which are capable of bifocal vision.

The study says one more thing: According to small, pale print on the cover page, it's co-sponsored—that is, paid for—by New York Life, one of the nation's biggest sellers of income annuities. The study's lead author, David Babbel, a Wharton professor of insurance and finance, says its conclusions weren't influenced in any way. "Once New York Life commissioned the study, they didn't know what we were going to come up with," says Prof. Babbel. "That's just how it is."

...The universities facilitating these studies and the professors writing them say they don't allow sponsors—which typically pay anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 for research—to do any meddling, and that academic freedom is always maintained. And the companies footing the bill say they're attracting attention to important financial issues...

Hans Stoll, director of Vanderbilt's Financial Markets Research Center, says business schools have been accused of not being close enough to the real world. "The connection to business is desirable. I don't think we want to sever that on the altar of conflict of interest."

More at the link. I'm more familiar with this process in the fields of the biological sciences. One key point to remember is that even though the funding sponsor may stay "hands off" and not influence the data collection or interpretation, they may be doing what some Big Pharma companies have done - fund ten studies, find the one with the most favorable results, and then promote those results in their advertising while ignoring the other nine with suboptimal or negative results.

This for an event that's not the person's fault - not caused by smoking or obesity or lack of exercise or alcoholism. It can happen to anyone at any time. Mine ruptured while I was raking leaves in the north woods of Minnesota and I drove back to southern Wisconsin to get the abscess resected.

The image above is not my bill; it's one that was posted at Reddit, where there is a lengthy discussion thread re the American health care system. (Note: the bill had been adjusted down from $96,000 because the family didn't have insurance).

Most people understand that Monarch butterflies in North America migrate south for the winter. That process has now begun, and those interested can track the process at the Journey North website.

During the migratory process, Monarchs often gather in tree "roosts" for overnight stays. Along the migratory route these are not nearly as spectacular as the enormous ones in Southern California or the ultimate ones at the Mexican terminus, but they are awesome spectacles nonetheless. I've had the good fortune to see one once while hiking. The map embedded above, from the Journey North website, shows the location of roosts reported so far.

Here is a brief amateur video of a tree roost. The video is low resolution, but it gives a flavor of the event, and the videographer has had the good taste not to spoil the images with some irrelevant music or commentary.

But of all the fortean fables associated with acid the ‘LSD in the water supply’ urban legend is by far the most potent and long-lived. And, unlike the rest of them, this one has at least some basis in reality...

All legends have their genesis in at least a grain of truth, and in this case the origins of the LSD-in-the-water tale appear to lie with the Central Intelli­gence Agency (CIA) and its fascination with the drug as a possible mind-control weapon...

Coming from the nearly half billion year old Middle Ordovician Asery Level deposits of the Wolchow River region near Saint Petersburg, Russia, this is an example of a member of the Order Phacopida, Family Cheiruridae called Paraceraurus (formerly Cheirurus) exsull. These are very dramatic trilobites, with expansive genal and pygidial spines.

Ice cube trays seem to be much less common these days, and most seem to be made of flexible plastic. When I was young, our family refrigerator had this style, with a lever that wiggled aluminum slats to (theoretically) loosen the cubes.

The story goes that on Oct. 15, 1794, chief coiner Henry Voigt coined the silver dollars and delivered all the acceptable ones, 1,758 of them, to David Rittenhouse, director of the US Mint, according to the Smithsonian Museum of American History. He handed them out as gifts to dignitaries...

Excerpts from a WSJ article about the use of puts to hedge large market drops:

In financial terms, a black swan usually results in drastic moves in the market—events such as the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the recent financial crisis. Statisticians call these events "fat tails" (because they occur on the fringes, or tails, of a bell curve), while professional investors try to manage their "tail risk."

Today, there are as many as 20 hedge funds specializing in tail-risk strategies, most of which have formed in the past 18 months... Retail investors are getting more access to black-swan-oriented strategies, too [via mutual funds]... Some individual investors even are considering setting up black-swan portfolios of their own...

Another risk: Because black-swan events are so unpredictable, the markets' reactions to them can be equally unpredictable. Just because an approach worked last time doesn't mean it will work in the future. Some of the new products launched in the past two years might not perform well under duress.

Of course, it takes a lot of diligence for ordinary investors to trade puts and calls on a regular basis. Those trades can be especially tough to swallow when markets are going up and options are expiring worthless.

[T]he earliest parts of the wall might have been built by the Frisians and not by the Danes. Archeologists now think the foundation stone might have been laid as early as the 7th century...

Comparative structures like border fortifications built by the Romans or the Great Wall of China were built to protect them from marauding hordes. But in the case of the Danevirke, the builders themselves were the ones known for their pillaging ways... But there was an Achilles heel in this far-flung trading empire, and that was at Hedeby. In order for goods from the east to be shipped to the west, they had to cross the narrow strip of land at the base of present-day Denmark...

Juliet Gardiner, the social historian and author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945, says that, while most people found looting despicable, examples differentiated between stealing someone's property and spotting a wireless or jewellery lying on the pavement after an air raid and reckoning that, if you didn't take it, someone else would. "Looting can be a rather elastic term," says Gardiner...

One trader in east London at the beginning of 1941 reckoned that shopkeepers lost more from crime than they ever did from German bombs. When the Café de Paris, which had a supposedly secure underground ballroom, suffered a direct hit in 1941, rescuers were shocked to find that looters were among them, yanking brooches and rings from the bodies of the revellers...

However, while the "spivs and drones", as the BBC described them at the time, may have had their "finest hour" and the crime rate increased by 57% from 1939 to 1945, there was never the descent into the kind of civilian lawlessness that has characterised so many other wars over the past half century.

27 August 2010

In his third novel, published in 1957, Ray Bradbury extolled the virtues of dandelion wine:

"Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue.
The wine was summer caught and stoppered."

For our generation here in the Midwest, frozen sweet corn serves the same purpose. This morning when we went to our favorite local farm to get sweet corn, we heard the sad news that today's would be the last crop of the year. So we got a couple dozen extra ears to freeze.

Here's the recipe, courtesy of Stoneman's family farm in Fitchburg, Wisconsin:

Combine all ingredients in a large kettle. Bring to a boil and simmer 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cool and do NOT drain. Package in Ziplock freezer bags.

Yield: seven 2-cup packages.

The top photo shows the corn after I had shucked it - beautiful bicolor ears with the corn so fresh that it's sweet raw without cooking or adding butter. It'll be frozen tonight and we'll save it to haul out when the first blizzard hits this winter. After shovelling knee-deep snow in sub-zero wind chills, we'll come in to enjoy a taste of summer

The North American Butterfly Association discourages the release of butterflies at weddings.

Butterflies raised by unregulated commercial interests may spread diseases and parasites to wild populations, with devastating results. Often, butterflies are released great distances from their points of origin, resulting in inappropriate genetic mixing of different populations when the same species is locally present. When it is not, a non-native species is being introduced in the area of release. At best, this confuses studies of butterfly distribution and migration; at worst, it may result in deleterious changes to the local ecology.

The smoot is a unit of length, defined as the height of Oliver R. Smoot — who, fittingly, was later the president of the ISO. The unit is used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. Canonically, and originally, in 1958 when Smoot was... at MIT, the bridge was measured to be 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one ear, using Mr. Smoot himself as a ruler. At the time, Smoot was 5 feet, 7 inches, or 170 cm, tall. Google Earth and Google Calculator includes the smoot as a unit of measurement...

"These women are incredibly body confident. I think there is something of a generational cultural difference. These young women do not buy the line that they are being exploited, because they are the ones making the money out of a three-minute dance and a bit of a chat. You have got to have a certain way about you to do it. They say 80 per cent of the job is talking.

Just over one in three dancers were in some form of education, with 13.9 per cent using dancing to help fund an undergraduate degree, 6.3 per cent to help fund a postgraduate degree, and 3.8 per cent using it to fund further education courses.

Some women begin dancing after graduating from university and not being able to find work. The researchers found arts degree graduates were most likely to report that they had turned to dancing after being unable to find other work. Others used dancing to provide a more steady and reliable income when working in more unstable arts jobs.

Two million people are now homeless, electricity grids have been closed down to prevent electrocution, water supplies are contaminated, livestock drowned, 1.7m acres of crops destroyed, bridges, roads, schools, whole villages swept away. Experts have warned of the high risk of a cholera epidemic and further monsoon downpours are forecast. Unlike in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake, when people jumped into their cars crammed with whatever supplies they had in their kitchens and drove to the affected areas, this time there is no voluntary mobilisation...

Jihadi-linked charitable organisations have been very effective at providing aid in times of crisis. The 2m children in Pakistan’s madrasahs are provided with free shelter, food and limited education where there is no government-funded alternative. In Mianwali, Imran’s constituency, 70% of all government schools are closed — “20% are ghost schools which exist only on paper, the other 50% have no teachers. It’s not surprising that poor people send their children to madrasahs”. There is a danger that those same charities will step into the void and gain credibility in the face of the government’s ineptitude.

The floods are likely to lead to massive poverty and unrest in an already volatile nuclear-armed country. There are two reasons why this should concern us here. In the geopolitical sense an impoverished, unstable, ungovernable Pakistan, with no control over militant extremists, would be a disaster that would make the floods look like rising damp. More importantly, it should concern us as human beings: a dying father tied his newborn child to a tree trusting that someone would help. That someone should be all of us.

25 August 2010

The first feature film to be released in Technicolor was Becky Sharp in 1935; it had been preceded by a few live-action films in 1934. But the video above is of film prepared in 1922 (for reference this is before the first Laurel and Hardy movies).

The process uses Kodachrome film, and is explained at the Kodak A Thousand Words website.

"In these newly preserved tests, made in 1922 at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, actress Mae Murray appears almost translucent, her flesh a pale white that is reminiscent of perfectly sculpted marble, enhanced with touches of color to her lips, eyes, and hair..."

The content of the video is largely irrelevant; it appears to be a sort of screen test using a silent movie actress. What is remarkable is the absolutely jaw-dropping color.

For a long time, we've all heard that gold is a commodity—no different, really, from silver or wheat or pork bellies. Its price ebbs and flows (supposedly) with inflation, which historically drives commodity prices.

The result: Over the past 30 years, the correlation between the dollar and gold is minus-0.65—a high negative correlation. It means the dollar and gold are effectively on opposite ends of a seesaw. When the dollar is in favor, gold retreats. When it is under pressure, gold prices swell...

For investors convinced U.S. lawmakers and central bankers will successfully manage the budgetary woes and the massive unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, then gold is overvalued in the long term. Righting America's national balance sheet would explicitly raise the dollar's value as investors with money abroad move assets into a more-sound American economy. The selling of euro, yen and pounds would push the dollar higher—and gold lower.

If, however, you worry the U.S. balance sheet is irreparably damaged, then gold currently reflects the likelihood that a weak-dollar trend still has years to run as the U.S. struggles with its financial mess. Investors—and consumers—looking to preserve their purchasing power will gravitate toward gold, since its quantity isn't easily manipulated.

While researching the post below this, I wandered into the "flat earth" realm, then to a page of "common misconceptions" where I found the notation that the Harvestman (shown above) is not a spider.

I grew up calling these "daddy longlegs" - a name also applied to cellar spiders. But it was harvestmen we always saw (and tried to avoid stepping on), and which we still see on a routine basis when gardening or working in the woods.

I actually bought this book. I offer that observation as a form of high praise, because I read lot of books and long ago decided it was impractical to buy them; our family are therefore ardent advocates of our local public library system (and enthusiastic supporters in various ways).

I checked this one out from the library based on a review in Harper's or The Atlantic or somewhere, and before I was a quarter of the way through I was ordering the book ($30 new, ~$9 from Amazon). The focus of the book is on the Waldseemüller map - the 1507 map that was the first to include the term "America" in identifying the recently-discovered western lands [note the word was placed on what is currently South America]. A thousand copies were printed - only one survived, and it is now owned by the Library of Congress.

The story of the map itself is most interesting, but the book ranges far beyond that story to encompass the whole history of cartography from antiquity through the 16th century. It's not a quick read - 400+ pages, lots of details, fortunately lots of illustrations, lots of worldviews and concepts of the cosmos - but all of it quite lucidly expressed, and to my view at least, endlessly interesting.

Simon's cat videos are widely enough seen not to be TYWK-type material, but this one was posted two years ago, and I apparently missed it at the time. All of them are remarkably true-to-life re feline behavior. This one via Ravings of a Semi-Sane Madwoman.

Almost half of those polled said they now use 'cheers' more often than 'thank you', while other popular phrases include 'ta', 'cool', and 'great'. A third said they would often just resort to a quick wave instead of saying 'thank you'...

Did you read/enjoy John Krakauer's Into Thin Air about the catastrophic climb of Mt. Everest? How about Endurance - the saga of Shackleton's voyage to the Antarctic? If you like adventure-based literature, you would probably enjoy reading this book about the exploration of supercaves. It details the "race" between two groups of cavers - one exploring a Mexican cave, the other a cave in the Caucasus - trying to establish a new record for reaching the bottom of the deepest cave on earth.

Instinctively, he lunged to grab the rope and dangling rappel rack. Had he been carrying no pack, or even a light daypack, it's possible that he might have saved himself by holding onto the rope, or to the anchor bolted to the wall, or perhaps even setting up something called a body rappel. But that would have required almost superhuman strength and would have been extremely difficult even without any load. His 55-pound pack made any such self-arrest impossible, and in another instant he was dropping through space. He fell so quickly that he did not even have time to scream.

A more thorough review of the book is posted at NPR's website. The book is an easy read in a reasonably brief 250 pages which can be consumed in an evening. If you're interested in the subject matter, but don't have even that much time, here is a TED talk by one of the subjects of the book, Bill Stone, who extrapolates from his caving experience to speculation about the exploration of other planets:

A nine-year-old girl scrubbing floors to support herself. As the U.S. struggles through this ever-lengthening and deepening recession, I think the above photo and attendant story are worth keeping in mind for anyone tempted to feel sorry for their own economic misfortunes.

Several weeks ago I discovered Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, which describes its content as "the outlandish, the anomalous, and the curious from the last five thousand years." As expected, it has quite a bit of "TYWK"-type material, so some of you may want to bookmark it. Here's are some sample excerpts from a post today:

The story recorded in the Tripartite Life of St Patrick claims that the saint went to Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. There he climbed to the top, sat down and told a passing angel that he would not leave the mountain ‘till I am dead or until all my requests are granted’...

The wronged individual went to the wrong-doers house and sat outside from dawn to dusk refusing to eat. By so doing he brought bad luck or ‘pollution’ to his opponent. The one fasted against then had two options. He could either admit his wrong and redress it – the fasting would stop and social harmony would be restored. Or he could counter fast to ward off the curse.

For the past several weeks we've had frogs on our windows picking off mosquitoes (YAY!) and moths that come to the lit windows at night. Coincidentally, this week I found a blog post at Naturespeak about the Gray Tree Frog, and learned that they can change colors:

It takes around a half hour for an individual to change color. They do so by controlling the pigment in their star-shaped skin cells. Though they can only go from green to gray and back again, they can also control the intensity of the dark splotch pattern found on the back. The sides appear to stay gray for the most part regardless of the chosen back color. Against natural settings, Gray Tree Frogs are masters of camouflage. Since the color choice is primarily intended for the daytime rest period (they are nocturnal) Gray Tree Frogs can pass the daylight hours in either color mode depending on background. In the photo below, this fellow was resting up against the chunk of bark and his pattern matched perfectly. The second photo is of the same frog at night, at which time he was in green mode...

SUGARCREEK TWP., Montgomery Co. (WDTN) - Witnesses said moments before the crash, Brennan was passing other drivers at speeds of at least 100 mph. He crashed when he drove off the left side of the roadway while passing a Sugarcreek Twp. police car. The crash was caught on that officer's cruiser camera.

"He went down into the median, into the grass, hit the guardrail, went airborne and the [Pontiac Firebird] hit the center post of the bridge and literally exploded into three main pieces," said witness Mark Riley.

Police said Brennan was alert and conscious after the crash and was flown to Miami Valley Hospital by Careflight where he was last listed in critical condition.

In American vernacular architecture, a witch window (also known as a Vermont window, a coffin window, or a sideways window) is a window (usually a double-hung sash window, occasionally a single-sided casement window) placed in the gable-end wall of a house and rotated approximately 1/8 of a turn (45 degrees) from the vertical, leaving it diagonal, with its long edge parallel to the roof slope. This technique allows a builder to fit a full-sized window into the long, narrow wall space between two adjacent roof lines. These windows are found almost exclusively in or near the U.S. state of Vermont, principally in farmhouses from the 19th century...

Photo and text from Wikipedia, where there is an explanation of the reasons for such windows, and the curious names applied to them.

"This flood in Pakistan is one of the greatest natural disasters that a nation has had to confront in recent history," he says. But the government is doing nothing, according to Khan, who says that only the military is doing good work. "Dollars, dollars, dollars," says Khan, as he runs his hand through his long hair and shakes his head. "Why do we always look abroad and expect help from there? Because we have the most corrupt, inept government of all time."

Some 20 million people, more than one-ninth of the population, have been affected by the floods. At least one-fifth of the entire surface area of Pakistan is still under water...

One thing is clear: The military is the political winner in this disaster. There are rumors that the flooding could perhaps lead to a new coup that would topple President Asif Ali Zardari. Pakistani journalists even maintain that they have been pressured by members of the army and the intelligence agency to spread lies about the government. There is virtually no way to verify these claims...

Imran Khan has read articles in American and British newspapers that argue that the Taliban could use the situation to expand their power base. "Nonsense," he says. "Pakistan is a great nation; there are 170 million of us. Does the world seriously believe that the Taliban is all that we have on our minds?"

He rolls up his shirtsleeves. His fund will be independent of his Tehreek-e-Insaf party ("Movement for Justice"), he says. "If we put aside all political differences, it shouldn't be so difficult to rebuild homes, streets and bridges."

Technology certainly has changed since I was a kid. I can understand the sight and the grip and the wrist brace at the back - not sure about the doodads that flare out to the sides in the front. More pix here.

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Readers - especially old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, and long-lost relatives - are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net